


Conversations With the Flesh

by nonelvis



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-22
Updated: 2011-07-22
Packaged: 2017-10-21 15:58:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonelvis/pseuds/nonelvis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"You're just a vat of bubbling goo," Cleaves said. "I don't know why I care about your welfare. You've brought me nothing but trouble."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations With the Flesh

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the second annual [who_like_giants](http://who-like-giants.livejournal.com) Minor and Original Character Ficathon. This story is mostly just an excuse to write loads of dialogue between Cleaves and the two Doctors; I loved the way they interacted onscreen and wished we could have seen more.

_All right, Miranda,_ Cleaves thought, _it's the dead of night, you're handcuffed to a steam pipe waiting for a guard to shoot you; might be time to re-examine your life choices._

Life choice failure number one: Flesh rights activist.

No, make that life choice failure number two. Number one: getting caught sabotaging her employer's latest and most questionable experiment. True, if it hadn't been for the second failure, the first would never have occurred, but still, she could have logged the guards' holiday schedules more carefully, noticed the related shift adjustments, fine-tuned her entry and escape timetable, perhaps come up with a different diversion.

She was trained to assess and compensate for risk, but had let her cause blunt her usual precision. Amateurish, and everyone in the acid-mining business knew the consequences of behaving like an amateur.

Somewhere between failure number five (taking an assignment on that damned island) and number seven (avoiding regular medical checkups), she thought she heard a bubbling noise from the vat of sentient Flesh taking up the rest of the room. Just her imagination, probably. The most benign noises always sounded suspicious in the hush of nighttime, and at least it wasn't the noise she most feared right now: the return of the guard she'd sent on a wild goose chase for her nonexistent accomplice on the other side of the lab complex.

Immediately after number ten (failure to study escapology), Cleaves was certain she heard splashing in the tank, but the dim amber emergency lighting revealed nothing.

But not long after number fourteen (sleeping with her boss, even if Julia'd been the one to start it), there was a long, deep sigh, followed by the squelching of moist footsteps approaching; and then the Doctor, bow-tie, floppy hair, and all, was crouching before her, waggling his fingers in her face, and greeting her with "Hello, Cleaves!" far more cheerfully than anyone should.

"You're dead," she said.

"Wouldn't be the first time I've walked away from that, though it _would_ be the first time I've been reconstituted from a batch of sentient protoplasm with long-distance molecular memory. I must say, the Flesh isn't terribly happy it's had to bring me back. Not that I'm not charming and tremendous fun at parties, but it was rather hoping Morpeth Jetsan would have given up on experimenting with it."

"So did I, but funny how when you tell major multinational corporations their product kills people, they come up with ways to make money from it anyway. Reproduce what happened on the island, but add mind-control locks this time. Instant slaves, no human overseers necessary."

"The Flesh noted your objection," he said. He tilted his head at her handcuffs. "And it appreciates the last-ditch sabotage attempt, but it thinks it's time for much bigger weapons. Namely, me."

"And what are you going to do?"

He stood, flipped several switches on the control panel above her, and started typing. "Text a friend," he said. "And then I thought there might be a few shenanigans."

When the wheezing and groaning noise began, and a blue box appeared where the massive vat of Flesh had stood, Cleaves barked with laughter.

* * *

Save a red bowtie instead of blue, the Doctor emerging from the TARDIS was still dressed identically to his Flesh counterpart, right down to the shoes.

"Lovely to see you again, Cleaves," he said.

"That goes double for me," added his Flesh counterpart.

"Oh, very nice, see what we did there?"

"You can unlock these any time, you know," said Cleaves, rattling her handcuffs against the pipe.

"Yes, of course." The Doctor tweedled the sonic at the cuffs.

Cleaves rubbed her wrists and pushed herself up off the floor. "They've been experimenting on the Flesh, Doctor. We have to stop them."

"Cleaves," he said, smiling, "you've come a long way since we first met."

"When I met you, Doctor, I had a career. I was dying, but I had stability. Now I have a desk job and a pension they haven't got round to taking away from me yet."

"Yes, but you've also got a conscience now, Cleaves. Never underestimate the value of a good conscience. Which is why I'm doing this," he said, and yanked the handle of the fire alarm. The alarm klaxons were deafening.

"What on earth ...?" Cleaves winced and covered her ears.

"Got to get everyone out before we make sure Morpeth Jetsan won't be doing any more work on the Flesh. Come along, Cleaves; time to put that conscience to work."

* * *

Morpeth Jetsan's experimental test facilities had a handful of staff on duty during the night shift, and making sure everyone was safely guided out of the lab complex didn't take long. "Remember this before you turn me in to Julia," Cleaves said to the bewildered young guard she'd tricked earlier. "She'll sack me anyway, but maybe she won't press charges."

She waited, shivering in the brisk night air, for whatever mayhem the Doctors had planned.

A few moments later, the wheezing sound of the TARDIS wafted in along with the breeze, and the two Doctors stepped outside the ship, now parked a good hundred meters from where the crowd had gathered.

The Doctor broke out a portable microphone. "Hello, everyone!" he called. "Could you all please step much closer to us? There's about to be a little incident, and we wouldn't want any of you to get hurt."

Cleaves took long strides through the shuffling and confused crowd. "What are you playing at, Doctor?" she said.

"Just cleaning up a mess by making one. I've already got a virus hard at work scrubbing the data side of things, so all that's left is one last message for your employer, which is this." He raised the microphone again. "You tell your bosses that the Doctor said – that the _Doctors_ said – no more playtime with the Flesh or any other sentient beings. Because if this is what I do when they harm my friends, they don't want to know what I do when I get _really_ angry."

Simultaneously, the Doctors removed sonic screwdrivers from their jackets and aimed them at the lab complex. "In you go, Cleaves," the Flesh Doctor said softly, nudging her towards the TARDIS doors.

She was almost all the way inside when the complex splintered into a fiery, smoky cloud and disappeared.

"Ah," she said. "That's definitely my pension done for, then."

* * *

The TARDIS had shuddered and jolted from side to side, and the curvaceous centre of the glass column had started to move, so Cleaves knew they'd taken off. Where to, the Doctors hadn't bothered to say. Instead, they'd huddled together over the controls, one tweaking a knob clockwise, the other slapping the first one's hand and tweaking the knob anticlockwise, all the while chattering about helmic regulators and thermocouplings. Eventually, they'd settled into a smoother rhythm, no longer batting at each other's work, but rather shifting harmoniously, passing control between themselves with little more communication than a low "Ha!" or quirked eyebrow.

"Doctor?" Cleaves was reluctant to break their spell.

Instead, two men spun around simultaneously. "Can we help you?" they said.

"You can tell me what comes next."

"We're sorting out what to do with the Flesh," said the Doctor.

"We'd like to find it a home," the Flesh Doctor added. "Somewhere safe for it to be all Fleshy and oozy, whatever makes it happy. And we thought you might want to come along for the ride. Help us keep an eye on it, as it were. After all, you probably know best how to care for it in its original form."

"And you don't? Because you're ..."

"True, I am Flesh, but I've stabilised myself for now, and you've spent all that time observing what they did to it and how they kept it alive."

"Besides," said the Doctor, "I'll bet you need a holiday. Responsible woman like you? Probably never take more than a day or two off at a time, and half that's spent catching up on _Industrial Piping Quarterly._ Not much of a hobby, that."

Cleaves crossed her arms. " _Industrial Piping Monthly_ , thank you. The _Quarterly_ 's rubbish."

"Come on," said the Flesh Doctor softly. "What's waiting for you at home? Besides, this is a time machine. We can have you back in your bed half an hour ago."

"You do know how to tempt a girl, Doctors. Free trip in space and time _and_ an alibi for the explosion, providing fifty-odd survivors forget I exist."

One straightened his bow tie; the other simply looked smug.

"You can't really do that ... can you?" she asked.

"Retcon everyone in the facility? Please. A hopelessly crude solution," said the Doctor. "I'm sure we can come up with something, short of rebooting the universe. Again."

"All right," Cleaves said. "But two weeks max, you hear? I'll go spare without some kind of a plan, and something tells me you're not the men to provide it."

"Miranda, we always have a plan. Usually. Sometimes. Depends on your definition of the word 'plan.' Anyway," said the Flesh Doctor, extending his hand to her, "welcome aboard."

* * *

It was crazy. She was inside a box no wider on the outside than her armspan, in a storeroom the size of her flat, talking to an industrial vat of pale peach, sentient jelly.

No, scratch that: it wasn't just the situation that was crazy. _She_ must be crazy. Though come to think of it, things hadn't stopped being crazy since she'd met the mysterious man in the bowtie, so perhaps she simply needed to readjust her definition of "crazy" to fit her new reality.

Cleaves folded her arms over the steel rim of the tank, rested her head against her elbow.

"You're just a vat of bubbling goo," Cleaves said. "I don't know why I care about your welfare. You've brought me nothing but trouble."

The Flesh rippled silently in its tank.

"If I'd just left well enough alone, I might still have a life to go back to. I could have told the guard I was my own ganger. Blamed it all on you. But I didn't, not that you care. You just sit there and bubble away like a giant Fleshy stew."

A bubble popped inches from her face. Apparently along with sentience, the Flesh was developing a sense of humour.

Cleaves wagged her finger at it. "If you want to be alive so badly, I'll give you one piece of advice: never bother with a conscience. It only gets in the way."

"Now, now, Cleaves," the Flesh Doctor said as he entered the room. "Without a conscience, you'd probably have never made it off that island in the first place."

"Details," she murmured. "But you know, if I'd died there – if Dicken and I hadn't told the company what happened – they'd never have tried this."

"True. But all things considered, I rather like you alive, Miranda, and so does the Flesh."

"Can you hear it, Doctor?"

"Yes, I can. It's still mulling over where it wants to be. All it knows is it's tired of humanity."

"I know that feeling."

"We all do, sometimes. Even me, and I've kept coming back to you humans for hundreds of years. Can't help it. Sometimes you do the most awful, unspeakable things – but you're so crammed full of life, like no other race I've met."

He grasped the side of the tank, peered down at the bubbling Flesh. "It's still pretty angry with humanity, and I can't say I blame it. But of all the people it wants to kill, you're lowest on its list, Cleaves, and right now, I'd say that's a good thing."

"'Least likely to be murdered,'" said Cleaves. "Faint praise, but I'll take it."

* * *

The Doctor had waved her off in the direction of the upper hallway when she'd asked where she'd be sleeping tonight. "Pick anything," he'd said. "Except the third door on the left; it's gone a bit swampy. Mind the alligators. Unless that's the fourth door on the right now. Never can tell what the old girl will get up to when she's bored."

Cleaves had eventually found a cosy, reptile-free room with a double bed, a chest of drawers, and a scrolltop writing desk. There was an eclectic selection of reading already waiting for her: the ancient Robin Hood tales she remembered reading as a child; a popular potboiler currently all over the bestseller lists; a stained, battered copy of _Moby-Dick_ , which she'd always meant to read. And hidden away in the desk drawer, under stationery from three different offworld hotels, was next April's _Industrial Piping Monthly._

He knew. They knew. How could they know?

"She's sentient," said the Flesh Doctor, leaning casually against the door frame. "The TARDIS, that is. She's welcoming you aboard."

"And she thinks I'll be here long enough to get through _Moby-Dick_?"

"She takes a fancy to some of the people who travel with me. And to think she called you 'strays.' I think she likes the extra attention, don't you, old girl?" He patted the door frame, and Cleaves could have sworn she heard a low humming noise from the engines in response.

"I'm only here long enough to take care of the Flesh, Doctor."

"Suit yourself, Cleaves," he said. "But rest up; we'll be on Ventrakis IV by morning, and you don't want to miss the bazaar!"

"No, of course, wouldn't want to miss that, wherever it is." She settled on the bed, tested its springs. It was exactly the right amount of firmness. "You do this a lot? Bring home strays?"

He shrugged. "Now and then."

"And you don't count as a stray?"

"I'm not a stray. I'm me."

"Then it's normal, is it, for you to travel with more than one of yourself?"

"You'd be surprised. Though usually it doesn't go quite so smoothly. Must be that I'm that much more perfect this time round."

She shook her head. Ask him something straightforward; get a response that made you question his sanity.

"It's good that you're here, Cleaves. He might not admit it, but I will."

"I thought you were the same man."

"We are, but consistency's awfully boring." He straightened up, rocked back on his heels. "Anyway, you'll be good for the Flesh. And you get a holiday to boot; can't knock that."

"I'm only playing nursemaid because you don't have anyone else. I've got a million other things to do at home, you know. Find a new job, for one."

"Cleaves, Cleaves, Cleaves. Relax. You know how to do that, don't you? Deep breaths? Meditation? Fun? Surely you're familiar with the concept of 'fun,' aren't you?"

"'Fun.' No, can't say I've ever heard the word before."

"Don't worry; we'll soon fix that."

"Of course." She untied her boots and walked over to the chest of drawers, where she was unsurprised to find a set of plaid flannel pyjamas in her size. "All right, then, off with you. I'm going to look into this 'fun' concept you seem so obsessed with."

"Good." He grinned at her. "The Doctor and I will open negotiations with the Flesh about what it wants and where it wants to go. In the meantime: rest. And fun. Don't forget about that."

"Yes, sir," she said. "Now, out. I'm changing."

"Not too much, I hope," he said, and closed the door behind him.

* * *

Five days into this so-called holiday, and Cleaves had calculated that she was spending twenty-five percent of her time tending the Flesh, twenty-five percent of the time sleeping, and fifty percent of the time running for her life or trying to keep the Doctors from making bloody fools of themselves. The latter usually resulted in the former, she'd found, but the Doctors seemed blithely unconcerned, probably due to their uncanny ability to talk themselves out of most situations – and failing that, judicious application of explosives or other chaos often did the trick.

They were frequently together, troublesome twins she hadn't signed on to shepherd but was nevertheless responsible for. It seemed she was always responsible for something, whether she wanted to be or not.

Including, apparently, stocking the bath linens. "Doctor?" Cleaves called. "Doctor? I can't find the spare towels."

The console room was lit like the twilight edge of sunset, dim threads of orange weaving through the dusk. Cleaves knew the Doctors had to be here, because it seemed they were always here of an evening, adjusting dials and levers, or polishing the brasswork while murmuring sweet nothings to their ship.

She thought she heard one of them now: soft, indistinct humming rising from the engine room below. "Doctor?" she called again, making her way onto the flight deck, down the curved staircase, as the noises grew louder.

They were there, all right, Flesh and the other one, whatever he was; though in this half-light, she couldn't tell which was which – just that one was in the sling, and the other was kneeling in front of him, and that the sweet nothings usually directed at the ship were clearly directed at himself.

Just her luck to shack up with the alien exhibitionists, she thought, and marched back up the stairs. Her towel could probably last one more day.

* * *

The Doctor joined her in the kitchen the next morning, sunny and cheerful as ever, parked himself next to her, and promptly stole a forkful of eggs. He chewed for a moment, made a face, and spat them out in his hand.

"I must teach you to scramble eggs properly, Cleaves. _Oeufs brouillés_. Lovely word to say, _brouillés_. Taught Escoffier himself to do it – or was it Emeril? Which one was the noisy Frenchman?"

"Right," Cleaves said, putting down her fork. "New rules. One: cook your own damned eggs. Two: no sex anywhere I can see it."

"Cleaves!" He blushed. "How did you -"

"Did you miss the part about not having sex anywhere I can see it? The 'anywhere I can see it' bit's especially important."

"It was just a little harmless experimentation. We were wondering how the Flesh reacts under ... certain circumstances."

"There's nothing wrong with scientific curiosity, but you've got this ridiculously massive ship; no need for you and him to mess about where I might walk in on it."

"Cleaves ... you set a rule. Two rules."

"What, I'm not allowed to do that?"

"My ship. My rules."

"And as long as I live here, I get to make them, too. Here's another one: the rim of the kitchen sink is not a drying rack for your socks." She sipped her tea. "Stop looking at me like that. Didn't Amy and Rory have any say in things when they travelled with you?"

"No. They were perfectly well-behaved guests who knew their place."

"Good for them," Cleaves said. "Now, move your socks, and for goodness' sakes, wash that egg off your hand. You're as bad as a three-year-old."

Grumbling to himself, the Doctor got up and rinsed his hands. "Honestly, Cleaves, I thought you were planning to relax."

"This _is_ relaxed. I've made myself a lovely breakfast, I'm three hundred pages into a tawdry serial killer novel I'm completely appalled to be enjoying, and now I'm asking you to observe some simple boundaries that will enable me to continue to be relaxed."

"Boundaries! For me! On my ship!"

"I can leave anytime, you know."

"No, no, no need for that, Cleaves. Besides," he added, "I like a woman who knows what she wants."

"So do I," Cleaves said. "Pity you haven't any onboard."

"Oh, I can fix that. After we've sorted out the Flesh, remind me to give my friend River a call."

* * *

The Doctors had helped Cleaves root out Flesh-compatible temperature and humidity regulation equipment from one of the TARDIS' scrapheaps, but scrubbing the tank's sloped sides was still best done by hand. Cleaves and the Flesh Doctor crouched inside the tank, scouring in circles.

She'd found him in the tank room again. The Flesh was her responsibility, and she cared for it diligently, setting up automated warning systems in case something went wrong. But more often than not, when it came time for her to make her rounds of the room, the Flesh Doctor was there already, braced like a sentry over the tank, watching silently. The first few times she found him, he'd made excuses about confirming the piping's welded joists were still holding, but he stopped bothering with those quickly enough.

Cleaves had seen for herself that live gangers were no different than their human progenitors, but perhaps Time Lords were slightly less identical than they thought. They looked the same, they talked the same – oh, how they talked – but Cleaves suspected the actual differences between them were less evident than the bow ties she used to distinguish them. Specifically, that as far as she could tell, only one of the Doctors was still regularly paying visits to the Flesh.

She waited for a break in his latest monologue. It took a while.

"What's it really like in there?" she asked.

"In where?"

"There." She nodded towards the spare tank full of Flesh. "Living on in the Flesh's molecular memory."

"It's warm. Peaceful, at least until they started the electric currents and ion bombardments." He stopped scrubbing, ran his hand through his hair. "You spend four months floating in a vat of collective consciousness, eventually you forget how to be solid. It's like a word or a flavour on the tip of your tongue, something you can't quite identify, but you know you've heard it or tasted it before. I'd probably never have climbed out of that vat if the Flesh hadn't needed me."

Cleaves attacked an oily patch with her brush. "Well, I'm glad you did."

"Cleaves," he said softly, "you're still in there, too. If you wanted ... I could make a connection."

She rested her palm against the side of the tub, suddenly dizzy. For a moment, she cursed the clot in her head before she remembered it wasn't there anymore and hadn't been for months thanks to the man beside her; or a version of him, anyway.

And now he was offering her a different gift. He'd already taken her on a tour of other worlds – she had the sore calves to prove it – but it was another thing entirely to embrace her other self, floating bonelessly in a sea of personalities, living a life as alien to Cleaves' as she could imagine.

"No."

"You're sure?"

"Plenty of cleaning left to do yet, Doctor."

He turned wordlessly back to his scrubbing, but there was no missing the wounded look on his face.

* * *

The Lobellian royal dungeons were every bit as damp and musty as the old monastery back on that island a galaxy and a half away from here, though Cleaves took some comfort in the fact that the worst she expected here was soggy feet, not acid burns.

As she splashed through puddles in search of her two wayward hosts, a very difficult part of her hinted she might be enjoying things more than she let on. It wasn't the first time her rebellious brain had done this, and she'd told it to keep quiet – but it never did, at least not for long.

She eventually found the Doctors chained up in the last cell on the left. "Cleaves!" cried the Doctor. "A sight for sore eyes. And arms."

"If this is some bondage experiment of yours, please don't tell me," she said, pointing the sonic screwdriver she'd brought with her at their bonds.

"Cleaves, sexual experimentation is perfectly normal," the Flesh Doctor said.

"And usually private. Don't forget about that part."

"Oh, let it go, Cleaves. It was just the once," said the Doctor.

"You always forget about that time in the library."

The Doctors grinned at each other. "Fair cop," said the Flesh one.

"But that's not why we're here. For some reason, the king took offence to a small proposal of ours," the Doctor said.

"Not that kind of proposal," corrected his twin.

"Though he is rather handsome, in a despotic kind of way."

"It's disappointing, isn't it, how few despotic monarchs appreciate it when you offer to free their people?"

"Yes, but it does make life so much more interesting."

If she didn't jump in now, they'd be here all night. "I think you should know that while you two were busy debating whether you fancy the king, the rebels surrounded the castle -"

"Marvellous! Knew they had it in 'em," said the Doctor.

"They gave me ten minutes to get you before they said they'd start the shelling, and it took me eight and a half just to talk my way down here. So if we could do a little more running and a little less talking ...?"

"Why, Cleaves, I believe you're finally getting the hang of this," he replied, and led the way out of the cells.

* * *

That night, she found the Flesh Doctor in the tank room again, palm pressed to the bubbling liquid.

"Just filling it in on the day's activities," he said. "It hates feeling left out."

"Remind me to build it a little cart. We can drag it along with us next time."

He withdrew his hand, scraping it on the side of the tank. "There won't be a next time, Cleaves. The Doctor and I found a home for the Flesh. We're headed there now."

There it was, that dizziness again. "How long until we get there?" she asked.

"A few hours."

She joined him by the side of the tank, rested her hand on his arm. Every time she'd found him in here before now, his face had hung low in wistful melancholy. Now, there was a spark at the corner of his eyes and an energy vibrating from him she recognised from those first moments setting foot outside the TARDIS doors, joining her and his counterpart on a new world.

"I'll miss you," she said.

"No need, Miranda," he replied. "I'll have you to talk to for the rest of my life."

* * *

The world the Doctors and the Flesh had chosen was practically an oversized asteroid: a tiny, rocky world pockmarked with dead volcanoes and thready patches of savanna. The air hummed with insects, but apart from that, there were no other signs of life.

Undignified as it was, they'd pumped the Flesh out of its vat and into a low, irregular depression. It pooled into a peach sea at their feet.

"Give me your hand," the Flesh Doctor said to Cleaves.

She still wasn't certain about this. But it was far from the first thing she'd done with them she wasn't certain about, and somehow, that had never stopped her.

He clasped her hand gently and lowered it into the shallow waves of Flesh lapping at the beach, shockingly pale against the rough basalt shore.

She'd never actually touched the Flesh before. Touching Morpeth Jetsan's most precious merchandise risked contamination, and you never did anything to damage the supply chain. Even after damaging the supply chain had turned into one of those regrettable life choices, there'd still never been a need to interact with the Flesh in any way other than the corporate-approved manner.

It was custard-thick, hot enough to flush her skin, but not so much it burnt. The Flesh Doctor's hand still clutched hers in security. She squeezed him back.

She'd been expecting voices. The molecular memory of hundreds of people lingered in the Flesh, but not even her own voice, the one she'd come to hear, spoke a word to her.

Instead, there was a silence so profound it sank over her, wrapped her like a woollen blanket, soothed her. The sharp, analytical shards of her brain softened, unfocused; her limbs loosened, fuzzed at the edges, expanded, relaxed. She drifted on a tide of Flesh, voiceless but still distinctly communicating: none of the hate she knew had been there, none of the resentment and pain, but simply calmness settling in, tinged with ...

"Miranda?" the Flesh Doctor said softly. "Do you understand?"

Ah, there it was, circling in from the outer rim of Cleaves' extended consciousness. What she'd come to hear, even if she hadn't heard it properly, the way she'd expected.

Cleaves let go of the Flesh Doctor's hand, and felt reality snap pieces back in place, one by one. "It's ... I think it's satisfied," she said. "Almost happy. Mostly just ... content."

"It'll get to happy. _We'll_ get to happy, in time."

"So this is goodbye, then?"

"More like 'until we meet again.'" He reached for Cleaves, embraced her. "In a couple of minutes, I'd say."

He turned to the Doctor next, who embraced him just as tightly, and finished with a swift kiss. "A collective consciousness. Never thought I'd do that again," said the Doctor.

"Maybe someday," his Flesh counterpart replied. "After all, it's a big universe, full of possibilities."

He waded into the pool of Flesh. It lapped at his knees, waves creeping up his trousers, drawing him in.

Cleaves heard the shrill whine of the sonic, and then he was gone.

* * *

She and the Doctor sat on the shore afterwards, watching the Flesh ripple its way through its new home, slipping into crevices and bubbling up between the rocks. She tried to imagine the Flesh Doctor was one of the fearless, exploratory tendrils curling in and out of the porous stone. By that logic, she was probably the Flesh surrounding his rock, sending him psychic instructions to stop what he was doing and come down from there that instant before he hurt something.

"I should have been dead by now," she said. "Instead I'm here on some far-off rock, with an alien, just having sent his alien ganger off to live in an ocean of sentient Flesh. And it all seems completely normal."

"That's good, though, isn't it?"

"The not being dead bit? It's not bad." She smiled. "It'll do for now. And so will the rest of it."

"How long are you going to stay with me?" he asked.

"Until I sort out what I want to do with myself, or I get tired of rescuing you, whichever comes first," Cleaves said. "A month. Six weeks at the outside. After that, I'm going to want a real job again."

"I admire your dedication, Cleaves."

"And I admire your ability to cause so much trouble on such a regular basis."

"Everyone needs a hobby."

"Well," Cleaves said, linking arms with him, "I suppose you can be mine for a while."


End file.
